The Atheists’ Bible
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published by the American Atheist Press in 1986. This book is filled with supposed contradictions, historical inaccuracies, moral problems, etc. in the Bible without any attempt to present the ancient debate which it represents; many of the answers I found date back hundreds of years.
In the Foreword to the First American Edition Madalyn O’Hair says, “Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book.” In Isaiah 28 we read why the Bible is written the way it is: 11: For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. 12: To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear. 13: But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.
Any rebuttal is much longer than the complaint and, after noticing I had a 9-page document discussing the first 1½ pages of the book, I realized I couldn’t write anywhere near a complete review of this book without writing 10 volumes myself. So I have confined myself to a single chapter, “Bible Immoralities, Indecencies, and Obscenities,” and I have had to pick only a few topics from this chapter. If anyone has a favorite argument from this book or any other source, I would be happy to research the answer.
Many of the complaints in this chapter have to do with the subject of incest. Incest was originally a genetic problem, not a moral one, and for this reason its prohibition was not necessary until the time of Moses. According to scripture, God created Adam and Eve perfect. There was no death in them nor in the world. One example of the protections from death in the original environment is the water canopy that protected the earth from cosmic ray bombardment, the primary cause of free radicals, which are, in turn, the primary cause of aging. This vapor canopy produced a tropical environment everywhere on the earth. It also caused a higher barometric pressure and a higher oxygen content than we have now, which is why hyperbaric oxygen chambers are so effective in medicine.
Sin, and with it death, entered the world through Adam’s disobedience to the prohibition he had been given by God. There was something in that fruit (whatever the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was) which damaged Adam and Eve’s DNA. Imagine eating a thalidomide-laced food substance or a food contaminated by radioactivity. Yet, even in their originally created but now corrupted state, they lived for more than 900 years. During the approximately 1700 years before Noah’s Flood genes were weakening, but they were not yet sufficiently weak to cause congenital deformities. At the Flood, the water canopy collapsed so the earth was now bombarded by radiation from space and the ground broke up, releasing the water from below the surface and radiation from deep within the earth. Life spans quickly decreased after this point and about 800 years later, at the time of Moses, God outlawed family formation from among siblings.
Creationism is no less a science than evolution and evolution is no less a religion than creationism. I always welcome serious questions on this subject as well.
Another category of complaints in this chapter points out sins committed by the patriarchs as if the patriarchs should be completely without sin. I have chosen from among this category the instance in which Abraham told King Abimelech that his wife, Sarah, was his sister “Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife’s sake.” Sarah was Abraham’s half sister, so what he said was true, but only a half-truth. God intervened by telling Abimelech in a dream that Sarah was Abraham’s wife. This is what else God said to Abimelech, “Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her. Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live: and if thou restore her not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are thine.” Well, Abimelech was understandably upset. He got up early the next morning and said to Abraham, “What hast thou done unto us? and what have I offended thee, that thou hast brought on me and on my kingdom a great sin?”
I fail to see any moral problem in recognizing that there is only one person in the whole of human history completely without sin. As a matter of fact, that’s the whole story of the Bible in a nutshell.
The Bible Handbook rests on faulty assumptions, an incomplete understanding of scripture and the physical reality of the universe, twisted moral values, and willful ignorance of what God has actually said, both about Himself and about us. In the words of Paul in Romans 1:22: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23: And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
– Jamie Berry is a Personal Wealth Strategist in Glendale, jamie@strategicwealthnet.com,
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